Orange (R. 180)

Throughout his career, Kandinsky developed a complex theory of color, its relationship to form, and how artists use this connection to spontaneously express ideas that cannot be articulated otherwise. He first wrote on this topic in his seminal 1912 text Über das geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art). Kandinsky's ideas matured during his tenure as a professor at the Bauhaus, where he constructed a sophisticated and personal vocabulary of shapes, forms and their related colors to express his ideas, all of which are apparent in his master print Orange. In 1923, the same year that he created this print, Kandinsky published a short essay in the now-famed Bauhaus review (Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar) on his conclusions, which can be summarized in his phrase, 'in reality, color cannot exist without form.'